Analysis

The International Monetary Fund has urged regulators to keep a close eye on private debt as the once obscure asset class enters the investment mainstream.

Sweeping technological change can upset the best laid plans of big institutional investors. But the way they deal with it is ad hoc, “hazardous” and distorts how they think a portfolio should behave.

Ruffer expects a sudden reversal in the smooth conditions that investors have enjoyed. The ubiquity of multi-strategy hedge funds, algorithmic market making and 0DTE options might make it much worse.

Every investor wants access to the private markets, and every manager – established or otherwise – wants to help them get it. But when there’s a “new product every day”, how many of them will be any good?

Big institutional investors need to make a “very compelling case” to go galloping off into trickier parts of the market. Gold is now offering one.

Super funds are an accumulation wonder of the world, but when it comes to retirement they’re in the same leaky boat as every other defined contribution system. BlackRock wants to bail it out.

TPA is an “uncommon and demanding” approach to running an investment organisation, according to the Future Fund, but a rewarding one – as long as institutions that take it up know that it’s not a transformation that should be embarked upon lightly.

The AUD$660 billion M&G has been a “sleeping beauty” down under, and it wants more than the mandate it already runs for the Future Fund. Thinking like an asset owner is part of the equation.

More and more of the global institutional investor set is turning to thematic strategies even as they resist the use of ESG benchmarks amidst questions about the methodologies that underpin them.

In private debt, you win by not losing, and key to not losing is good manager selection. But with a massive number of “me too” players entering the market, that’s getting harder.

The smart money at the US$10 trillion asset manager is in hedge funds, gold and inflation-linked bonds, while local investors in its exchange-traded products are bargain hunting in China.

When is a bubble not a bubble? When traditional monetary transmission mechanisms are disintermediated by private credit. Meanwhile, a decent chunk of so-called ‘alternatives’ are just beta in a low-vol wrapper.